Vintage 1993: Wine 1.0 launches

Timed for the 15th anniversary of the project, Wine 1.

The open source Wine project is celebrating its 15th anniversary by releasing version 1.0 of the software. The software provides libraries that shunt Windows API calls to their posix, X11, or OpenGL equivalents, allowing many binaries compiled for Microsoft's OS to run on various forms of *nix. Unlike virtualization software, this method does not require any version of Windows to be installed on the computer hosting Wine, nor does it suffer the performance hits involved with emulated environments.

That said, Wine isn't as complete a solution as virtualization. It only aims to provide compatibility for the Win32 APIs and DirectX (Direct3D support is limited), meaning that applications targeting more recent Microsoft APIs may be left out in the cold. Implementation of the sprawling Win32 toolkit—including "bug-for-bug compatibility"—has also been done on a somewhat ad-hoc basis, largely focused by attempts to get specific applications working. Stray too far off the beaten path, and unexpected behavior should be expected. Fortunately, this also means that the most popular applications have received the most attention; support for Adobe Photoshop and Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example, arrived earlier this year.

Wine has been somewhat controversial within the Linux community, as some have argued that the effort put into the project would be better spent on creating equivalents of the Windows software that Wine enables users to run. The project appears a bit sensitive to these criticisms, as they host two pages dedicated to countering them. Still, there's little doubt that, for users that absolutely need to run one or two Windows programs, Wine can provide them that capacity with a lower strain on their finances and hardware.

Wine faces a huge challenge in reimplementing an API that dates to the early 90s, has been frequently updated, and is known for taking backwards compatibility to nearly pathological levels. As such, this version draws a somewhat arbitrary line in terms of what level of performance is acceptable in a 1.0 release; a list of bugs that will be fixed in the 1.0.1 and 1.2 versions is already in place. Still, the software has been seeing a large number of updates to the 0.9.5 and 0.9.6 series this year, so it's hard to begrudge them celebrating the project's anniversary in this manner.